High tech tagging adds graffiti to poles

[Akira] looks to increase his urban canvas by tagging poles which some custom hardware. If you’re looking to add some art to a lamp post, height becomes a problem. That’s where this little guy comes in. The remote-controlled pole climber includes a marker that leaves a trail as the device climbs and descends.

The rig clamps around a pole, with omnidirectional bearings on three sides of the four-sided frame. That last side is occupied by a rubber wheel mounted at a bit of an angle. When the motor turns the angle of the wheel causes the jig to rotate around the pole and climb at the same time. To come back down the motor is simply reversed. Xbee modules are used to make a rudimentary wireless control with a button for up and another for down. It looks like the marker is also mounted on a servo but we didn’t see a way to control when it is actually touching the pole. Perhaps you can figure it out by studying the clip after the jump.

Just posting an opinion, yes you’ve done other graffiti posts, and yes, I still think it’s a bad idea. Different strokes, yada yada yada. Overall, HAD is a good site and generally getting better with age – I’d just hate to see it slide in the wrong direction.

I’ve always thought of hackaday as that bright kid in the back of the classroom wearing all black. Compared to sites like make who definitely sit in the front row and bring the teacher an apple on test day.

For a bunch of socialists you have some funny ideas about how to treat public property. Graffiti is one person’s idea of art. Doesn’t sound like that is a very good thing to impose on everyone else’s property.
At least some good ideas came out of this (like using this to repaint poles that need it).

Many people like to be taught “ethics free”, meaning that while you could go do evil with something, you could also do something great with it. Please, don’t drag the rest of us down with your one-sided view of the world because chances are, we don’t share that view. Graffiti is beautiful if done correctly and its acceptance by society in general has been seen in the media recently, specifically those “do you have what it takes to go to college” commercials. Yes, I know you feel strongly about the subject but so do we and you’re quickly becoming the minority. I’m also sorry to inform you that nobody will mourn your loss.

So this thing climbs a pole and has a selectable trigger for a pen…..
hack it folks……
replace pen with can of white or silver paint, trigger to activate….
climb to top of pole.. activate spray, spiral down…. newly repainted pole.

+1
I’d much rather see a good hack come out of this. The camera idea is a good one too. I don’t mind art, if you have the permission to put it there. Same goes with advertising. I hate the signs stuck along the roadside. Buy a billboard like everyone else. ..falls off soapbox.

I wish my local hunting store sold graffiti tags, like deer tags. That would be awesome to legally cap a few of those a holes. There have no respect for other peoples stuff. I wish if nothing else I could just shoot the can from their hands at 200 yards. That would make a mess, let alone the can fragments.

Oh I forgot, Burglary is a property crime, and you can be shot for that. Who says that I was going to kill them. Just making their can explode would probably make them stop tagging forever. That is the problem with society, justifying felony activities.

Come on down to Texas, or Louisiana, and you could see what happens to Burglars.

Good luck with that concept, you can rot in prison with the rest of the immoral trash who believes that. It is very illegal to kill someone over material crimes even in texas louisiana etc. I am a person who believes deeply in the right to defend ones self but you make us armed citizens look like psychopaths.

This literally “Stands on it’s OWN merits” for tech chops alone. A well done knitting together of all the elements to make something that DOES something= worthy of respect for that alone. IoW- instead of hating on things- Get out there and make MAGIC..Eh? Akira has brought a dimension to “Printing” that we’d be Sub-Morons to dismiss. Hell, I see derivatives of this tech that argue for rethinking a LOT of how we see our world.

Making something like this work at all. let alone well is non trivial. Give it a try and It’s rather likely you’ll have new respect for what’s involved.

There’s folks here fracking unwilling to feel shamed by morons who slag everything “just because they can” and that sort of disrespect is not cool. It’s not cool to disrespect good honest Hackery and it’s not cool either to let others have control over us merely because they can fling poo. Gresham’s law can be fought as any other entropic struggle, by creating that which displaces. MAGIC in Hackery is the antidote to morons who contribute naught but noise. The debates of “what’s _art_ or not” are a dead horse beaten to no DNA left. Same with the issues of Rain Soluble Vs varying degrees of persistence. ALL of those debates about conduct in the Commons RE “LEaving Marks” also are equally beaten horses when we’re evaluating a Hack on IT’S OWN MERIT. So kindly redirect flames and crudfling to places where consensus demands them…mnnkay? Speaking for me alone- I rather dislike crudfling and safely wager that consensus shares my dislike. Back to operations?

Seriously of course.

Decades ago some cities had the street grid numbers painted on ALL posts of major arterial streets. There’s a few places where it’s still “sort of” maintained. One of these Pole Climbers could with a bit of design tuning..do a “Good Enough” job of deploying Grid Numbers as such. Envision oh- YOUR Hackerspace approaching the local authorities for permission/blessing/even funding? To deploy a team running these up the poles marking a utilitarian grid numbering. And perhaps whimsical fancy “could” be somehow embedded?

As noted at http://www.DefacingAmerica.com , we don’t have an art problem. We have a vandalism problem. We can stop graffiti. Graffiti vandalism is a selfish act where an individual or small number of people take what they want from the community. They want visibility so they take a space you paid for, perhaps a fence at your home or a street sign or lamp post in your neighborhood that you paid for in taxes. Graffiti vandals often start graffiti writing thinking it is harmless, that it is appropriate freedom of speech or self expression, that it improves the visual environment. If we want to stop graffiti we need to foster attitudes that recognize graffiti for what it is. Unauthorized vandalism, highly destructive and costly to repair.